Page - 25 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

The Banality of Ghosts | 25www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 15–34 The Act of Killing is set in Medan, a highly multi-ethnic Indonesian city in North Sumatra.38 The film follows a group of “preman”, or free men, around former death squad leader Anwar Congo. Back in the 1960s, these men were fans of Marlon Brando, John Wayne and other American movie stars. They saw themselves as cowboys, selling and reselling cinema tickets. In Medan, this group was deeply involved in the killings of thousands of “communists”, as they claim them to have been, and Chinese. The film does not provide informa- tion or tell stories but challenges the perpetrators to re-enact the killings they performed while Oppenheimer is behind the camera. The result is, in Oppenhe- imer’s words, a “non-fiction fever dream”.39 The film director was initially struck primarily by the boasting of these killers. He recalls filming in 2004 former death-squad leaders who demonstrated to him how in less than three months their squads had slaughtered more than 10,000 people in a clearing by a river. That experience inspired him to try to under- stand such bragging and how it was related to impunity. In Oppenheimer’s own words, quoted in the New York Times, “Here are human beings, like us, boasting about atrocities that should be unimaginable.”40 For Oppenheimer, and for many people watching his work on the G30S, this boasting appears as a strange ritual of exorcism. In The Act of Killing Oppen- heimer searches for moments when ghostly apparitions are articulated non-dis- cursively. To find these moments, he focuses on “symptoms”, so on shivering, uneasiness, angriness, loud voices, laughter and silences. For him, symptoms are “telling”. He understands his role as a cinéaste as similar to that of a mid- wife, as he explores “how to massage reality so that it gives birth to those meta- phors that are immanent in it”.41 His perspective is, however, more similar to that of a priest, as I will show in my analysis of Scene Three below. Moments and symptoms hidden in these metaphors make visible how people cope with the “good” killing of “bad” people, as the Suharto New Order regime has portrayed this history for decades. The boasting of the cocky killers is such a symptom. Boasting, Oppenheimer claims, is a means of hiding. It means “desperately run- ning away from the guilt”, he told kunstundfilm.de during an interview.42 Silence in the movie is another symptom, especially present in the director’s cut. These moments of silence, Oppenheimer assumes, are “haunted landscape shots”. The absent victim seems to appear in the silence, as if this victim “haunts every frame of the film”. This haunting becomes tangible in portrayals of the dead who are continually addressed, as cut-off heads, bleeding victims or happy mur- 38 Anderson 2012, 274–279. 39 Louisiana Channel. 40 Rochter 2013. 41 Louisiana Channel. 42 Barnes 2017, kunstundfilm.de.